It was one of the stranger career trajectories in recent memory: Ryan Bingham, a mid-level singer-songwriter with a slim back catalogue, was rescued from folkie purgatory by the makers of the film Crazy Heart, for which he would eventually win both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Original Song for “The Weary Kind.”

Because his victory likely had as much to do with a groundswell of support for star Jeff Bridges and awards-bait producer T-Bone Burnett as it did for his solid, workmanlike songs, Bingham’s first post-Oscar release, the gravelly, understated Junky Star, finds him in an awkward position: He’s now the Three 6 Mafia of Americana acts, with a reputation bigger than anything he’s actually done to deserve it.

Junky Star, also produced by Burnett, isn’t the showy, big-budget career-solidifier it might have been; luckily, it’s precisely the sort of underplayed album Bingham might have made if his Hollywood detour had never happened.

With the help of his backing band, the Dead Horses, Bingham spins New Depression-era tales of lucklessness and woe that alternate between stripped-down guitar ballads and full-band rave-ups, some overly literal (“Depression”), others (the record-closing, career-high “All Choked Up Again”) ragged and mournful, but just right. — The Washington Post